Sick, Stupid and Sterile: The 50th Anniversary of ‘Silent Spring’
In September 1962 – 50 years ago this month – a book was published which changed the way we looked at the post-World War Two chemical revolution. Rachel Carson’s Silent…
Common Sense Journalism
The Weight of People
Behind the questions that people ask are assumptions that are often more revealing than the questions themselves. One of these revealing questions appeared in “Collected Wisdom”, a weekly newspaper column…
Farewell to Peter Lougheed – A Real Common Sense Canadian
It was a more progressive development of the Tar Sands that happened on Lougheed’s watch. What a pity his policy wasn’t continued, for he stood squarely for this project be…
CETA Trade Deal, Jumbo Resort Proposal and Water Privatization
Freelance writer and researcher Joyce Nelson connects the dots between the approval of the Jumbo Glacier Resort proposal in the Kootenays, a controversial trade deal between Canada and the European…
Rafe on ‘Corporate Citizenship’ and Changing Views
Does the fact I recognize corporations do what is in their financial self-interest – that the onus of demonstrating the environmental safety of mines, fish farms, pipelines, tankers falls not…
BC NDP Must Come Clean on its Full Energy Policy
The NDP are getting a free ride – at least they certainly are on the energy file. I must ask again: Why are they not condemning the proposed twinning of…
The Last Climate Change Skeptic
If Dr. Richard Muller, a professor of physics from the University of California, Berkeley, is not the last of the global climate change skeptics, he should be. For years he…
The fraudulent public hearings
I have been to a number of joint federal/provincial hearings and I’d rather have a root canal without novocaine than attend another. The chair and the company representative are joined…
The Internet Addiction
One of the most powerful and pervasive of our recent inventions has been the Internet, the digital magic that has compressed time into microseconds and space into irrelevance. The distance…
Tankers too risky for coast environment
Three engineers including two professors emeritus from UBC have verified what I and others have been saying for some time. An article in the September 1 Vancouver Sun tells us…
The Enbridge Pipeline – it’s all about PR now
We are now seeing the public relations world at work. I know something about the philosophy behind Public Relations companies and their siamese twin, the advertising company. If you want…
Premier Clark should step aside
I simply cannot see how, short of a fluke, Christy Clark can lead her party to victory in May 2013. She didn’t have a chance from the start. With but…
The Dilbit Silence
“Dilbit” is a contraction of “diluted bitumen”, a little word loaded with controversy that has recently entered the English vocabulary. This is because “bitumen”, a word in long existence, has…
Dix committed to revoking Equivalency Agreement
After considerable due diligence it seems the Official Opposition has thoroughly aired the issue through its team of legal beagles and finally we have seen a move on the issue.…
LNG, Fracking and Site C Dam: BC’s Looming Energy Boondoggle
As big of a game-changer as oil pipelines and tankers would be for BC, one could argue that the collection of proposed natural gas-related developments on the table is, taken…
Gordon Gibson, David Black, and the Fraser Institute got it wrong
Rafe Mair takes on an op-ed by Gordon Gibson, in favour of David Black’s Kitimat refinery proposal, published in the Globe and Mail. He identifies this proposal as “idiotic”, and…
National Energy Strategy a Deception of EPIC Proportions, Designed to Fleece Canadians
In this piece, the first of a series of three, we explore why a National Energy Program is political suicide, yet something called a National Energy Strategy is all the…
Carbon Costs
Vancouver is the latest city to consider costly preventative measures that should reduce the astronomical costs associated with more active weather. The city is still stinging from a 2006 windstorm…
Audio: Damien Gillis Discusses Energy and BC’s Economy on Co-op Radio
Check out this interview from Aug. 15 on Vancouver Co-op Radio’s “Discussion”, with host Charles Boylan. Guest Damien Gillis and Boylan cover a wide range of topics relating to energy…
Refining the Black Stuff in Kitimat Doesn’t Make Sense
One must, I suppose, take newspaper tycoon David Black’s offer to build a refinery near Kitimat seriously, although the idea is preposterous on several fronts. For openers, he doesn’t tell…